Kubernetes @ Home

2017-12-13

For many years now, I have a Jenkins running at home, for my personal projects.
The problem is that, it’s running on my laptop.
So, I basically have a setup where Jenkins tells me “it works on [your] computer”.
This is far from ideal.

Following home’s lab

There are 2 articles I read recently which gave me the motivation to have a proper setup at home.
Few days ago, the excellent Jessie Frazelle wrote a post about labs at home.
If you have read it, pause here and go read it: Home Lab is the Dopest Lab.
Few weeks ago, Carolyn Van Slyck wrote a suite of articles on how she used NUCs to create her DVDs digitalization pipeline. Same thing, go read her articles, they are excellent: My Little Cluster Story.

What’s the connection?

Well, my Jenkins is my lab.
I use it to build side project, to experiment.
But I don’t have it running all the time.
For example, at the time I write this line, I haven’t started it for 4weeks..

So I want to setup it correctly.
I could simply buy a NUC and install Jenkins on it.
That would be it.

But I’d like to leverage the NUC to run my side projects as well.
So Kubernetes.

Why Kubernetes?

First, everyone’s speaking about it.
Second, I might need to understand it, use it for my job.
Third, why not?

So, before buying anything, I’ll setup a minikube instance on my laptop (again).
Make sure I can really use and understand K8S (as the cool kids say).
Then I’ll setup properly a NUC with my Jenkins.
I’ll see after that if I need more of them.

So yes, at first it’ll be a one node k8s cluster..

I’ll try to “document” my experiment here.
It won’t be glorious (like if anyone read this..) but it might worth the time, so I make sure I do understand what I’m doing.